The future of Minicraft+

As we will have many new features and function in the newly planned versions in Minicraft+, we will introduce them later. As the beginning, we will have the 2.2.0 update. After that, we will also have 2.3.0 update and many other updates. What about the update themes?

Well, in 2.2.0: The story update, you can see that we will have many storyline-related features within the 2.2.0 update. Recipes, the second boss, quests and many interesting things! The original storyline of Minicraft is abouit an adventure of the player, with finally goal of killing Air Wizard. Also, you would need to kill other mobs. Which matches the theme of the 22nd Ludum Dare competition, "Alone". We plan to expand the storyline so as to give more gameplay experience. Quests, give you the goals of the game; tutorials, guide the players to start the game; the real second boss - Obsidian Knight, gives you the another goal after Air Wizard (also replaces the second Air Wizard). You can track the progress here.

The 2.3.0 update? What's the point on updating it? We will rewrite the save system. You are going to rewrite the part of game? Yeah, we are going to rewrite the whole game engine after 2.2.0. We have split the game engine rewriting update into 2.3.0 and 3.0.0 updates. I cannot ensure that we will not change the plan of versioning. Why we are going to rewrite the save system? If you have taken a look on the current save system, you would know that there are many limitations on the current CSV game world save system. Since we need to expand the game, we need the more advanced game world save format. JSON, we will mainly use it as CBOR. What are they? Minecraft has NBT format, we will use CBOR. I know that they also use NBT as the attributes of items, blocks, etc. as their dynamic attributes. I have also discovered that the reason of why the use of dynamic attributes. Using dynamic attributes can expand the limitation of customization, but I am not sure that would we do that as well. The reason of why we are not using dynamic attributes is they cannot be check in compile time, argued previously by Makkkkus (the current maintainer of Minicraft+). But I think that it is important about the customization.

The muitiplayer update, I am not sure when we update it, but we will update it when/after the new save system is updated. As the previous multiplayer system is messy, we have removed it earily. We plan to add it back with better support later. You can track it by GitHub project. The main part of the game engine rewrite would be the rendering system. We would rewrite it by using a Java library, LWJGL, which is also use by Minecraft.

We will also have Minicraft Launcher and cross-platform support in the future. When? I don't know. And as what User:Litorom earlier, some consoles require marketable games. Why we cannot make it marketable and monetizable? Firstly, it is unlicensed and originally belongs to Notch, Markus Persson. Secondly, it is supported by community. Unless we purchased it and make it closed-source or like what Oracle is doing. Why am I saying that? OpenJDK is licensed under GPLv2 while Oracle JDK only allows personal non-commercial use and commercial use with different licenses. OpenJDK is 99% the same code as Oracle JDK. With our current license, it is GPLv3, which allows people to fork and menetize. But we can also menetize it if we are allowed to .

With further more topics in the future: what's our target and built-in mod loader. I have also been developing the mod loader which called MiniMods.

We have many plans on Minicraft+!

Note

This blog is based on the previously discussed topic. See the #develop Discord channel.